Access USB Drives in Parallels and Your Mac Simultaneously

If you run Windows and Mac apps side-by-side with Parallels, you may have been annoyed in the past that you can’t use removable volumes (like USB drives) simultaneously in OS X and your Windows virtual machine. Web site Mac OS X Hints details how to remedy this problem with a simple solution: add a shared folder in Parallels that points to /Volumes. Not only will the new shared folder give you access to USB drives, but also your DVD drive and all other mounted volumes on your Mac—and you get it all without having to hassle with individually connecting and disconnecting drives from your virtual machine. I tried to duplicate this method in VMWare Fusion but wasn’t able to select the /Volumes folder. Either way, the Parallels hack is smart and saves a ton of time.